Cryptography, as defined in the introduction to this article, is the science of transforming information into a form that is impossible or infeasible to duplicate or undo without knowledge of a secret key. Cryptographic systems are generically classified (1) by the mathematical operations through which the information (called the “plaintext”) is concealed using the encryption key—namely, transposition, substitution, or product ciphers in which two such operations are cascaded; (2) according to whether the transmitter and receiver use the same key (symmetric [single-key] cryptosystem) or different keys (asymmetric [two-key or public-key] cryptosystem); and (3) by whether they produce block or stream ciphers. These three types of system are described in turn below.

The easiest way to describe the techniques on which cryptography depends is first to examine some simple cipher systems and then abstract from these examples features that apply to more complex systems. There are two basic kinds of mathematical operations used in cipher systems: transpositions and substitutions. Transpositions rearrange the symbols in the plaintext without changing the symbols themselves. Substitutions replace plaintext elements (symbols, pairs of symbols, etc.) with other symbols or groups of symbols without changing the sequence in which they occur.

In manual systems transpositions are generally carried out with the aid of an easily remembered mnemonic. For example, a popular schoolboy cipher is the “rail fence,” in which letters of the plaintext are written alternating between rows and the rows are then read sequentially to give the cipher. In a depth-two rail fence (two rows) the message WE ARE DISCOVERED SAVE YOURSELF would be written

Simple frequency counts on the ciphertext would reveal to the cryptanalyst that letters occur with precisely the same frequency in the cipher as in an average plaintext and, hence, that a simple rearrangement of the letters is probable.

The rail fence is the simplest example of a class of transposition ciphers, known as route ciphers, that enjoyed considerable popularity in the early history of cryptology. In general, the elements of the plaintext (usually single letters) are written in a prearranged order (route) into a geometric array (matrix)—typically a rectangle—agreed upon in advance by the transmitter and receiver and then read off by following another prescribed route through the matrix to produce the cipher. The key in a route cipher consists of keeping secret the geometric array, the starting point, and the routes. Clearly, both the matrix and the routes can be much more complex than in this example; but even so, they provide little security. One form of transposition (permutation) that was widely used depends on an easily remembered key word for identifying the route in which the columns of a rectangular matrix are to be read. For example, using the key word AUTHOR and ordering the columns by the lexicographic order of the letters in the key word

In decrypting a route cipher, the receiver enters the ciphertext symbols into the agreed-upon matrix according to the encryption route and then reads the plaintext according to the original order of entry. A significant improvement in cryptosecurity can be achieved by reencrypting the cipher obtained from one transposition with another transposition. Because the result (product) of two transpositions is also a transposition, the effect of multiple transpositions is to define a complex route in the matrix, which in itself would be difficult to describe by any simple mnemonic. (SeeProduct ciphers, below.)

In the same class also fall systems that make use of perforated cardboard matrices called grilles; descriptions of such systems can be found in most older books on cryptography. In contemporary cryptography, transpositions serve principally as one of several encryption steps in forming a compound or product cipher.

In substitution ciphers, units of the plaintext (generally single letters or pairs of letters) are replaced with other symbols or groups of symbols, which need not be the same as those used in the plaintext. For instance, in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’sAdventure of the Dancing Men (1903), Sherlock Holmes solves a monoalphabetic substitution cipher in which the ciphertext symbols are stick figures of a human in various dancelike poses.

The simplest of all substitution ciphers are those in which the cipher alphabet is merely a cyclical shift of the plaintext alphabet. Of these, the best-known is the Caesar cipher, used by Julius Caesar, in which A is encrypted as D, B as E, and so forth. As many a schoolboy has discovered to his embarrassment, cyclical-shift substitution ciphers are not secure. And as is pointed out in the section Cryptanalysis, neither is any other monoalphabetic substitution cipher in which a given plaintext symbol is always encrypted into the same ciphertext symbol. Because of the redundancy of the English language, only about 25 symbols of ciphertext are required to permit the cryptanalysis of monoalphabetic substitution ciphers, which makes them a popular source for recreational cryptograms. The explanation for this weakness is that the frequency distributions of symbols in the plaintext and in the ciphertext are identical, only the symbols having been relabeled. In fact, any structure or pattern in the plaintext is preserved intact in the ciphertext, so that the cryptanalyst’s task is an easy one.

There are two main approaches that have been employed with substitution ciphers to lessen the extent to which structure in the plaintext—primarily single-letter frequencies—survives in the ciphertext. One approach is to encrypt elements of plaintext consisting of two or more symbols; e.g., digraphs and trigraphs. The other is to use several cipher alphabets. When this approach of polyalphabetic substitution is carried to its limit, it results in onetime keys, or pads.

In cryptosystems for manually encrypting units of plaintext made up of more than a single letter, only digraphs were ever used. By treating digraphs in the plaintext as units rather than as single letters, the extent to which the raw frequency distribution survives the encryption process can be lessened but not eliminated, as letter pairs are themselves highly correlated. The best-known digraph substitution cipher is the Playfair, invented by Sir Charles Wheatstone but championed at the British Foreign Office by Lyon Playfair, the first Baron Playfair of St. Andrews. Below is an example of a Playfair cipher, solved by Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Have His Carcase (1932). Here, the mnemonic aid used to carry out the encryption is a 5 × 5-square matrix containing the letters of the alphabet (I and J are treated as the same letter). A key word, MONARCHY in this example, is filled in first, and the remaining unused letters of the alphabet are entered in their lexicographic order:

Plaintext digraphs are encrypted with the matrix by first locating the two plaintext letters in the matrix. They are (1) in different rows and columns; (2) in the same row; (3) in the same column; or (4) alike. The corresponding encryption (replacement) rules are the following:

When the two letters are in different rows and columns, each is replaced by the letter that is in the same row but in the other column; i.e., to encrypt WE, W is replaced by U and E by G.

When A and R are in the same row, A is encrypted as R and R (reading the row cyclically) as M.

When I and S are in the same column, I is encrypted as S and S as X.

When a double letter occurs, a spurious symbol, say Q, is introduced so that the MM in SUMMER is encrypted as NL for MQ and CL for ME.

An X is appended to the end of the plaintext if necessary to give the plaintext an even number of letters.

If the frequency distribution information were totally concealed in the encryption process, the ciphertext plot of letter frequencies in Playfair ciphers would be flat. It is not. The deviation from this ideal is a measure of the tendency of some letter pairs to occur more frequently than others and of the Playfair’s row-and-column correlation of symbols in the ciphertext—the essential structure exploited by a cryptanalyst in solving Playfair ciphers. The loss of a significant part of the plaintext frequency distribution, however, makes a Playfair cipher harder to cryptanalyze than a monoalphabetic cipher.

The other approach to concealing plaintext structure in the ciphertext involves using several different monoalphabetic substitution ciphers rather than just one; the key specifies which particular substitution is to be employed for encrypting each plaintext symbol. The resulting ciphers, known generically as polyalphabetics, have a long history of usage. The systems differ mainly in the way in which the key is used to choose among the collection of monoalphabetic substitution rules.

The best-known polyalphabetics are the simple Vigenère ciphers, named for the 16th-century French cryptographer Blaise de Vigenère. For many years this type of cipher was thought to be impregnable and was known as le chiffre indéchiffrable, literally “the unbreakable cipher.” The procedure for encrypting and decrypting Vigenère ciphers is illustrated in the figure.

The Vigenère tableIn encrypting plaintext, the cipher letter is found at the intersection of the column headed by the plaintext letter and the row indexed by the key letter. To decrypt ciphertext, the plaintext letter is found at the head of the column determined by the intersection of the diagonal containing the cipher letter and the row containing the key letter.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

In the simplest systems of the Vigenère type, the key is a word or phrase that is repeated as many times as required to encipher a message. If the key is DECEPTIVE and the message is WE ARE DISCOVERED SAVE YOURSELF, then the resulting cipher will be

The graph shows the extent to which the raw frequency of occurrence pattern is obscured by encrypting the text of this article using the repeating key DECEPTIVE. Nevertheless, in 1861 Friedrich W. Kasiski, formerly a German army officer and cryptanalyst, published a solution of repeated-key Vigenère ciphers based on the fact that identical pairings of message and key symbols generate the same cipher symbols. Cryptanalysts look for precisely such repetitions. In the example given above, the group VTW appears twice, separated by six letters, suggesting that the key (i.e., word) length is either three or nine. Consequently, the cryptanalyst would partition the cipher symbols into three and nine monoalphabets and attempt to solve each of these as a simple substitution cipher. With sufficient ciphertext, it would be easy to solve for the unknown key word.

Letter frequency analysis of a Vigenère cipherThe text of this article was encrypted with a repeated-key Vigenère cipher—the key word is DECEPTIVE—and in a random polyalphabetic cipher. The figure shows how the relative frequency distribution of the original plaintext is disguised by the corresponding ciphertext, which more closely resembles a purely random sequence supplied as a baseline.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The periodicity of a repeating key exploited by Kasiski can be eliminated by means of a running-key Vigenère cipher. Such a cipher is produced when a nonrepeating text is used for the key. Vigenère actually proposed concatenating the plaintext itself to follow a secret key word in order to provide a running key in what is known as an autokey.

Even though running-key or autokey ciphers eliminate periodicity, two methods exist to cryptanalyze them. In one, the cryptanalyst proceeds under the assumption that both the ciphertext and the key share the same frequency distribution of symbols and applies statistical analysis. For example, E occurs in English plaintext with a frequency of 0.0169, and T occurs only half as often. The cryptanalyst would, of course, need a much larger segment of ciphertext to solve a running-key Vigenère cipher, but the basic principle is essentially the same as before—i.e., the recurrence of like events yields identical effects in the ciphertext. The second method of solving running-key ciphers is commonly known as the probable-word method. In this approach, words that are thought most likely to occur in the text are subtracted from the cipher. For example, suppose that an encrypted message to President Jefferson Davis of the Confederate States of America was intercepted. Based on a statistical analysis of the letter frequencies in the ciphertext, and the South’s encryption habits, it appears to employ a running-key Vigenère cipher. A reasonable choice for a probable word in the plaintext might be “PRESIDENT.” For simplicity a space will be encoded as a “0.” PRESIDENT would then be encoded—not encrypted—as “16, 18, 5, 19, 9, 4, 5, 14, 20” using the rule A = 1, B = 2, and so forth. Now these nine numbers are added modulo 27 (for the 26 letters plus a space symbol) to each successive block of nine symbols of ciphertext—shifting one letter each time to form a new block. Almost all such additions will produce random-like groups of nine symbols as a result, but some may produce a block that contains meaningful English fragments. These fragments can then be extended with either of the two techniques described above. If provided with enough ciphertext, the cryptanalyst can ultimately decrypt the cipher. What is important to bear in mind here is that the redundancy of the English language is high enough that the amount of information conveyed by every ciphertext component is greater than the rate at which equivocation (i.e., the uncertainty about the plaintext that the cryptanalyst must resolve to cryptanalyze the cipher) is introduced by the running key. In principle, when the equivocation is reduced to zero, the cipher can be solved. The number of symbols needed to reach this point is called the unicity distance—and is only about 25 symbols, on average, for simple substitution ciphers.

Vernam-Vigenère ciphers

In 1918 Gilbert S. Vernam, an engineer for the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T), introduced the most important key variant to the Vigenère system. At that time all messages transmitted over AT&T’s teleprinter system were encoded in the Baudot Code, a binary code in which a combination of marks and spaces represents a letter, number, or other symbol. Vernam suggested a means of introducing equivocation at the same rate at which it was reduced by redundancy among symbols of the message, thereby safeguarding communications against cryptanalytic attack. He saw that periodicity (as well as frequency information and intersymbol correlation), on which earlier methods of decryption of different Vigenère systems had relied, could be eliminated if a random series of marks and spaces (a running key) were mingled with the message during encryption to produce what is known as a stream or streaming cipher.

There was one serious weakness in Vernam’s system, however. It required one key symbol for each message symbol, which meant that communicants would have to exchange an impractically large key in advance—i.e., they had to securely exchange a key as large as the message they would eventually send. The key itself consisted of a punched paper tape that could be read automatically while symbols were typed at the teletypewriter keyboard and encrypted for transmission. This operation was performed in reverse using a copy of the paper tape at the receiving teletypewriter to decrypt the cipher. Vernam initially believed that a short random key could safely be reused many times, thus justifying the effort to deliver such a large key, but reuse of the key turned out to be vulnerable to attack by methods of the type devised by Kasiski. Vernam offered an alternative solution: a key generated by combining two shorter key tapes of m and n binary digits, or bits, where m and n share no common factor other than 1 (they are relatively prime). A bit stream so computed does not repeat until mn bits of key have been produced. This version of the Vernam cipher system was adopted and employed by the U.S. Army until Major Joseph O. Mauborgne of the Army Signal Corps demonstrated during World War I that a cipher constructed from a key produced by linearly combining two or more short tapes could be decrypted by methods of the sort employed to cryptanalyze running-key ciphers. Mauborgne’s work led to the realization that neither the repeating single-key nor the two-tape Vernam-Vigenère cipher system was cryptosecure. Of far greater consequence to modern cryptology—in fact, an idea that remains its cornerstone—was the conclusion drawn by Mauborgne and William F. Friedman that the only type of cryptosystem that is unconditionally secure uses a random onetime key. The proof of this, however, was provided almost 30 years later by another AT&T researcher, Claude Shannon, the father of modern information theory.

In a streaming cipher the key is incoherent—i.e., the uncertainty that the cryptanalyst has about each successive key symbol must be no less than the average information content of a message symbol. The dotted curve in the figure indicates that the raw frequency of occurrence pattern is lost when the draft text of this article is encrypted with a random onetime key. The same would be true if digraph or trigraph frequencies were plotted for a sufficiently long ciphertext. In other words, the system is unconditionally secure, not because of any failure on the part of the cryptanalyst to find the right cryptanalytic technique but rather because he is faced with an irresolvable number of choices for the key or plaintext message.

In the discussion of transposition ciphers it was pointed out that by combining two or more simple transpositions, a more secure encryption may result. In the days of manual cryptography this was a useful device for the cryptographer, and in fact double transposition or product ciphers on key word-based rectangular matrices were widely used. There was also some use of a class of product ciphers known as fractionation systems, wherein a substitution was first made from symbols in the plaintext to multiple symbols (usually pairs, in which case the cipher is called a biliteral cipher) in the ciphertext, which was then encrypted by a final transposition, known as superencryption. One of the most famous field ciphers of all time was a fractionation system, the ADFGVX cipher employed by the German army during World War I. This system used a 6 × 6 matrix to substitution-encrypt the 26 letters and 10 digits into pairs of the symbols A, D, F, G, V, and X. The resulting biliteral cipher was then written into a rectangular array and route encrypted by reading the columns in the order indicated by a key word, as illustrated in the figure.

The ADFGVX cipher, employed by the German army in World War I.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

The great French cryptanalyst Georges J. Painvin succeeded in cryptanalyzing critical ADFGVX ciphers in 1918, with devastating effect for the German army in the battle for Paris.

Key cryptosystems

Single-key cryptography is limited in practice by what is known as the key distribution problem. Since all participants must possess the same secret key, if they are physically separated—as is usually the case—there is the problem of how they get the key in the first place. Diplomatic and military organizations traditionally use couriers to distribute keys for the highest-level communications systems, which are then used to superencrypt and distribute keys for lower-level systems. This is impractical, though, for most business and private needs. In addition, key holders are compelled to trust each other unconditionally to protect the keys in their possession and not to misuse them. Again, while this may be a tolerable condition in diplomatic and military organizations, it is almost never acceptable in the commercial realm.

Another key distribution problem is the sheer number of keys required for flexible, secure communications among even a modest number of users. While only a single key is needed for secure communication between two parties, every potential pair of participants in a larger group needs a unique key. To illustrate this point, consider an organization with only 1,000 users: each individual would need a different private key for each of the other 999 users. Such a system would require 499,500 different keys in all, with each user having to protect 999 keys. The number of different keys increases in proportion to the square of the number of users. Secure distribution for so many keys is simply insolvable, as are the demands on the users for the secure storage of their keys. In other words, symmetric key cryptography is impractical in a network in which all participants are equals in all respects. One “solution” is to create a trusted authority—unconditionally trusted by all users—with whom each user can communicate securely to generate and distribute temporary session keys as needed. Each user then has only to protect one key, while the burden for the protection of all of the keys in the network is shifted to the central authority.

Public-key cryptography

In 1976, in one of the most inspired insights in the history of cryptology, Sun Microsystems, Inc., computer engineer Whitfield Diffie and Stanford University electrical engineer Martin Hellman realized that the key distribution problem could be almost completely solved if a cryptosystem, T (and perhaps an inverse system, T′), could be devised that used two keys and satisfied the following conditions:

It must be easy for the cryptographer to calculate a matched pair of keys, e (encryption) and d (decryption), for which TeT′d = I. Although not essential, it is desirable that T′dTe = I and that T = T′. Since most of the systems devised to meet points 1–4 satisfy these conditions as well, we will assume they hold hereafter—but that is not necessary.

The encryption and decryption operation, T, should be (computationally) easy to carry out.

At least one of the keys must be computationally infeasible for the cryptanalyst to recover even when he knows T, the other key, and arbitrarily many matching plaintext and ciphertext pairs.

It should not be computationally feasible to recover x given y, where y = Tk(x) for almost all keys k and messages x.

Given such a system, Diffie and Hellman proposed that each user keep his decryption key secret and publish his encryption key in a public directory. Secrecy was not required, either in distributing or in storing this directory of “public” keys. Anyone wishing to communicate privately with a user whose key is in the directory only has to look up the recipient’s public key to encrypt a message that only the intended receiver can decrypt. The total number of keys involved is just twice the number of users, with each user having a key in the public directory and his own secret key, which he must protect in his own self-interest. Obviously, the public directory must be authenticated, otherwise A could be tricked into communicating with C when he thinks he is communicating with B simply by substituting C’s key for B’s in A’s copy of the directory. Since they were focused on the key distribution problem, Diffie and Hellman called their discovery public-key cryptography. This was the first discussion of two-key cryptography in the open literature. However, Admiral Bobby Inman, while director of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) from 1977 to 1981, revealed that two-key cryptography had been known to the agency almost a decade earlier, having been discovered by James Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm Williamson at the British Government Code Headquarters (GCHQ).

In this system, ciphers created with a secret key can be decrypted by anyone using the corresponding public key—thereby providing a means to identify the originator at the expense of completely giving up secrecy. Ciphers generated using the public key can only be decrypted by users holding the secret key, not by others holding the public key—however, the secret-key holder receives no information concerning the sender. In other words, the system provides secrecy at the expense of completely giving up any capability of authentication. What Diffie and Hellman had done was to separate the secrecy channel from the authentication channel—a striking example of the sum of the parts being greater than the whole. Single-key cryptography is called symmetric for obvious reasons. A cryptosystem satisfying conditions 1–4 above is called asymmetric for equally obvious reasons. There are symmetric cryptosystems in which the encryption and decryption keys are not the same—for example, matrix transforms of the text in which one key is a nonsingular (invertible) matrix and the other its inverse. Even though this is a two-key cryptosystem, since it is easy to calculate the inverse to a non-singular matrix, it does not satisfy condition 3 and is not considered to be asymmetric.

Since in an asymmetric cryptosystem each user has a secrecy channel from every other user to him (using his public key) and an authentication channel from him to all other users (using his secret key), it is possible to achieve both secrecy and authentication using superencryption. Say A wishes to communicate a message in secret to B, but B wants to be sure the message was sent by A. A first encrypts the message with his secret key and then superencrypts the resulting cipher with B’s public key. The resulting outer cipher can only be decrypted by B, thus guaranteeing to A that only B can recover the inner cipher. When B opens the inner cipher using A’s public key he is certain the message came from someone knowing A’s key, presumably A. Simple as it is, this protocol is a paradigm for many contemporary applications.

Cryptographers have constructed several cryptographic schemes of this sort by starting with a “hard” mathematical problem—such as factoring a number that is the product of two very large primes—and attempting to make the cryptanalysis of the scheme be equivalent to solving the hard problem. If this can be done, the cryptosecurity of the scheme will be at least as good as the underlying mathematical problem is hard to solve. This has not been proven for any of the candidate schemes thus far, although it is believed to hold in each instance.

However, a simple and secure proof of identity is possible based on such computational asymmetry. A user first secretly selects two large primes and then openly publishes their product. Although it is easy to compute a modular square root (a number whose square leaves a designated remainder when divided by the product) if the prime factors are known, it is just as hard as factoring (in fact equivalent to factoring) the product if the primes are unknown. A user can therefore prove his identity, i.e., that he knows the original primes, by demonstrating that he can extract modular square roots. The user can be confident that no one can impersonate him since to do so they would have to be able to factor his product. There are some subtleties to the protocol that must be observed, but this illustrates how modern computational cryptography depends on hard problems.

Secret-sharing

To understand public-key cryptography fully, one must first understand the essentials of one of the basic tools in contemporary cryptology: secret-sharing. There is only one way to design systems whose overall reliability must be greater than that of some critical components—as is the case for aircraft, nuclear weapons, and communications systems—and that is by the appropriate use of redundancy so the system can continue to function even though some components fail. The same is true for information-based systems in which the probability of the security functions being realized must be greater than the probability that some of the participants will not cheat. Secret-sharing, which requires a combination of information held by each participant in order to decipher the key, is a means to enforce concurrence of several participants in the expectation that it is less likely that many will cheat than that one will.

The RSA cryptoalgorithm described in the next section is a two-out-of-two secret-sharing scheme in which each key individually provides no information. Other security functions, such as digital notarization or certification of origination or receipt, depend on more complex sharing of information related to a concealed secret.

The best-known public-key scheme is the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) cryptoalgorithm. In this system a user secretly chooses a pair of prime numbers p and q so large that factoring the product n = pq is well beyond projected computing capabilities for the lifetime of the ciphers. At the beginning of the 21st century, U.S. government security standards called for the modulus to be 1,024 bits in size—i.e., p and q each were to be about 155 decimal digits in size, with n roughly a 310-digit number. However, over the following decade, as processor speeds grew and computing techniques became more sophisticated, numbers approaching this size were factored, making it likely that, sooner rather than later, 1,024-bit moduli would no longer be safe, so the U.S. government recommended shifting in 2011 to 2,048-bit moduli.

Having chosen p and q, the user selects an arbitrary integer e less than n and relatively prime to p − 1 and q − 1, that is, so that 1 is the only factor in common between e and the product (p − 1)(q − 1). This assures that there is another number d for which the product ed will leave a remainder of 1 when divided by the least common multiple of p − 1 and q − 1. With knowledge of p and q, the number d can easily be calculated using the Euclidean algorithm. If one does not know p and q, it is equally difficult to find either e or d given the other as to factor n, which is the basis for the cryptosecurity of the RSA algorithm.

We will use the labels d and e to denote the function to which a key is put, but as keys are completely interchangeable, this is only a convenience for exposition. To implement a secrecy channel using the standard two-key version of the RSA cryptosystem, user A would publish e and n in an authenticated public directory but keep d secret. Anyone wishing to send a private message to A would encode it into numbers less than n and then encrypt it using a special formula based on e and n. A can decrypt such a message based on knowing d, but the presumption—and evidence thus far—is that for almost all ciphers no one else can decrypt the message unless he can also factor n.

Similarly, to implement an authentication channel, A would publish d and n and keep e secret. In the simplest use of this channel for identity verification, B can verify that he is in communication with A by looking in the directory to find A’s decryption key d and sending him a message to be encrypted. If he gets back a cipher that decrypts to his challenge message using d to decrypt it, he will know that it was in all probability created by someone knowing e and hence that the other communicant is probably A. Digitally signing a message is a more complex operation and requires a cryptosecure “hashing” function. This is a publicly known function that maps any message into a smaller message—called a digest—in which each bit of the digest is dependent on every bit of the message in such a way that changing even one bit in the message is apt to change, in a cryptosecure way, half of the bits in the digest. By cryptosecure is meant that it is computationally infeasible for anyone to find a message that will produce a preassigned digest and equally hard to find another message with the same digest as a known one. To sign a message—which may not even need to be kept secret—A encrypts the digest with the secret e, which he appends to the message. Anyone can then decrypt the message using the public key d to recover the digest, which he can also compute independently from the message. If the two agree, he must conclude that A originated the cipher, since only A knew e and hence could have encrypted the message.

Thus far, all proposed two-key cryptosystems exact a very high price for the separation of the privacy or secrecy channel from the authentication or signature channel. The greatly increased amount of computation involved in the asymmetric encryption/decryption process significantly cuts the channel capacity (bits per second of message information communicated). As a result, the main application of two-key cryptography is in hybrid systems. In such a system a two-key algorithm is used for authentication and digital signatures or to exchange a randomly generated session key to be used with a single-key algorithm at high speed for the main communication. At the end of the session this key is discarded.

Block and stream ciphers

In general, cipher systems transform fixed-size pieces of plaintext into ciphertext. In older manual systems these pieces were usually single letters or characters—or occasionally, as in the Playfair cipher, digraphs, since this was as large a unit as could feasibly be encrypted and decrypted by hand. Systems that operated on trigrams or larger groups of letters were proposed and understood to be potentially more secure, but they were never implemented because of the difficulty in manual encryption and decryption. In modern single-key cryptography the units of information are often as large as 64 bits, or about 131/2 alphabetic characters, whereas two-key cryptography based on the RSA algorithm appears to have settled on 1,024 to 2,048 bits, or between 310 and 620 alphabetic characters, as the unit of encryption.

A stream cipher also breaks the plaintext into units, normally of a single character, and then encrypts the ith unit of the plaintext with the ith unit of a key stream. Vernam encryption with a onetime key is an example of such a system, as are rotor cipher machines and the DES used in the output feedback mode (in which the ciphertext from one encryption is fed back in as the plaintext for the next encryption) to generate a key stream. Stream ciphers depend on the receiver’s using precisely the same part of the key stream to decrypt the cipher that was employed to encrypt the plaintext. They thus require that the transmitter’s and receiver’s key-stream generators be synchronized. This means that they must be synchronized initially and stay in sync thereafter, or else the cipher will be decrypted into a garbled form until synchrony can be reestablished. This latter property of self-synchronizing cipher systems results in what is known as error propagation, an important parameter in any stream-cipher system.